much assistance. The main achievement of the Conference during the past year has been the draft of an Act respecting the contract of life. insurance. It is a fine piece of work. Through the munificence of Sir James Aikins the Conference will now be able to have a paid secretariate.

So much for what we might designate the constructive portion of the Association's activities as revealed to us at the Annual Meeting. Turning to what might be called the purely informative part of the programme of the meeting, that which embraced the formal addresses by the President, distinguished guests from foreign parts and members of the Canadian Bench and Bar, we learned much from the Presidential Address of the substantial uniformity that prevails in the political constitutions of the various English-speaking communities throughout the world; while the addresses of the Honourable Mr. Hughes, Lord Birkhead, and M. Pierre Lepaulle were all infused with a conviction that the true and only solvent of the present distress of nations is a renascence and restoration of the reign of international law. Indeed each of these three speakers might have appropriately taken as a text the challenge of Mazzini to the disturbed world of his day: "Are nations no longer allied, as individuals are, by duty? Can they remain strangers to the common task of leading mankind towards perfection?" It is agreeable to be able to say that all the formal addresses were of great excellence. The published Transactions of 1923 will be of signal value to those of our members who were not privileged to hear the addresses delivered.

But perhaps the most significant feature of the proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting inheres in the acceptance by the Association of the invitation of the English Bar to assist in entertaining the American Bar Association in London next year. To do this is to demonstrate not only the fine human quality of camaraderie possessed by lawyers the world over, but that legal science is so universal in its bearings that

the adherents of its diverse systems can find a common ground for co-operation in the interests of civilized society at large. Internationalism appears to be a more blessed word than Mesopotamia at the present moment, and for countries to unite in the effort to improve the whole field of law is internationalism at its best. Here, then, is an opportunity for lawyers from all parts of the Dominion to join with their American brethren in visiting a land rich in the possession of many relies of an age when the two systems of law familiar to us in Canada were struggling for supremacy there. It is a far cry from the time when Edward I. ordained that "apt and eager" students of the law were to be settled in close proximity to the Courts at Westminster-thus laying the foundations of a distinctive legal profession in England-to the day of Bar Associations in the New World; but the intervening centuries have seen no curve of discontinuity in the road of progress travelled by juristic science in England, and both law and legal institutions on this side of the Atlantic have their roots deep in the social soil of the early days of her civilization. Hence the vividness of her appeal to the imagination of every member of our profession who has not visited her shores; and the sense of profit in yielding to that appeal experienced by those who have. The Associa tion has done well in resolving to adventure this pleasant invasion of England.

We have hinted above that the Eighth Annual Meeting was marked by a high degree of sociability among the members of the Association, and that was due very largely to the well-known genius for hospitality which adorns the profession in Montreal. The frost of formality cannot withstand its sunny ways for a moment. Let us say that the fraternal quality of the meeting found its supreme expression in the presentation by the Association to Sir James Aikins, following upon his re-election as President, of a most excellent portrait of himself done by Ernest Fosbery, A.R.C.A. In making the presentation for the Association, Mr.

Eugène Lafleur, K.C., expressed in felicitous terms the great debt that the profession in Canada owes to Sir James for his foresight and fine courage in taking the lead in launching the Canadian Bar Association upon the troubled waters of the year 1914, and also for having sustained it by unremitting individual labour and many benefactions throughout the period of its existence. It is pleasing to know that this fine portrait is destined for a place in the National Gallery at Ottawa. Thus a fitting public honour will be done to the memory of a man who through the medium of the profession he loves has done much to stimulate and advance the spirit of national unity in Canada.

On the whole we think we speak advisedly when we say that the Eighth Annual Meeting was in many respects the greatest in the history of the Canadian Bar Association.

NOTE AND COMMENT.1

THE bicentenary of the birth of Sir William Blackstone fell on the 10th July of the current year. His "Commentaries on the Laws of England" is one of the best abused books in literary history. Abuse was its lot from the start. Bentham, who had learned to dislike Blackstone while attending his lectures, wrote his "Fragment on Government" to refute certain doctrines espoused by the author in the first volume of the Commentaries. That was in 1776. In 1785 he had retained so much of his rancour that he could speak of the departed Judge and jurist in the following lurid terms: "His hand was formed to embellish and corrupt everything it touches His is the treasure of vulgar errors, where all the vulgar errors that are, are collected and improved dupe of every prejudice, and the abettor of every abuse." John Austin is the chief singer in the modern chorus of dispraise of Blackstone; and recruits for that chorus never seem wanting. And yet it is an undoubted fact that the Commentaries were regarded as the chief repository of common law principles both in the United States and Canada during the nineteenth century. Not so long ago Leith's adaptation of the Commentaries to the Law of Ontario was of paramount importance to the student. So late as 1890 Prof. Hammond said in the preface to his (American) edition of the great work:

He is the

"Blackstone's Commentaries in their original shape are still the book most frequently put into the beginner's hands. Even the attempts which have been made to adapt it to their use by leaving out parts now regarded as obsolete have not been so successful as the unabridged editions. The difference between English and Ameri

1 EDITOR'S NOTE.-Contributions to this department of the REVIEW are cordially invited. Matter not prepared by the Editor will be authenticated by the names or the initials of the writers.

can students in this respect deserves attention, and points to an essential characteristic of Blackstone's relation to the law of the United States."

IN Badman v. The King, [1923] W. N. 242 the Court of Appeal in England (reversing Horridge, J., at Chambers), decided that under sec. 7 of The Petition of Right Act of 1860, the Court had jurisdiction to allow a petition of right to be amended, provided the amendment was of such a nature that the allowance of it would not derogate from the prerogative of the Crown, which sec. 2 shows it was the intention of the Act to preserve. The Court laid down the following test as to whether any particular amendment ought to be allowed: If the petition had originally been presented in the form in which it would stand were the proposed amendment allowed, would the AttorneyGeneral have advised the grant of the fiat?

Hitherto there has been some dubiety as to whether a petition could be amended at all without a fresh fiat, notwithstanding the large powers of amendment mentioned in the English Act and such Colonial Acts as are based upon it. In Robinson on Civil Proceedings By and Against the Crown, p. 386, it is said:

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"Can a petition of right be amended? The Crown has granted its fiat to a particular petition, and it is obviously not within the subjects' competence to amend it into something else without the Sovereign's leave, in spite of sec. 7 of the Act. Strictly, therefore, a fresh petition should be presented and a fresh fiat obtained."

Rule 117 of the practice of the Exchequer Court of Canada provides expressly for the amendment of a petition of right in the discretion of the Court or a Judge, but doubts have been entertained of its validity and it has been guardedly acted on. (See Audette's Practice, 2nd ed., pp. 447, 448). In Smylie v. The Queen, 27 Ont. A. R. 172, the Ontario Court of Appeal